I’ve spent enough time over the last five years in various remote locations to frequently be disconnected from “civilization” for months at a time. When this happens, I often notice changes that others have already taken for granted or missed entirely.
Boiling Frogs
There’s a story about how to best boil frogs. If you toss a frog in a pot of already boiling water, it will immediately jump out to save itself. But put a frog in a pan of room temperature water and only gradually increase the temperature, and the frog will happily hang out until you to boil it alive without it even noticing. I have no idea why you’d want to do this (or if it is even true), but the point is easily understood regardless — we are all of us capable of getting accustomed to detrimental, even deadly, changes if they happen slowly enough.
While I won’t suggest that people are in danger of literally dying due to smartphones (though texting drivers are), in my role as gadfly I do feel the need to warn you that you are in danger of slowly boiling your minds to mush. You need to stop looking at your damn phones All. The. Damn. Time.
Every time I have returned to the States over the past five years, I am re-surprised by the degree to which people are more and more entranced by their smartphones. If anyone has even ten free seconds, they seem to whip their phone out and begin doing something or other.
I am often guilty of this myself. And don’t get me wrong: having a computer in your pocket is a true miracle, and I would never personally give mine up. Having music, magazines, and books available to read wherever I want, the ability to find out what is nearby me on a map and to coordinate plans at the last minute are all wonderful things. Especially when traveling, a smartphone is an amazing tool. Social media and other attention-demanding apps have a more obvious dark side, but even these can be legitimately wonderful things.
But the dark side — the dopamine-pushing, brain-scattering, addictive nature of the devices as currently used — is also real.
(Side note: I’ve been surprised at the swelling counter-reaction in recent years to the “bad” side of smartphones. People are recognizing the ways in which companies engineer their products to be addictive and attention-demanding, as well as the ways in which the very nature of social media can exacerbate tribalism and partisanship. So I suspect I am not writing anything here you don’t already know about, at least at some level.)
The Deep Problem
Here’s the deeper underlying issue, though, and why I think that the smartphone, which is always with you, is especially problematic:
Your mind has to be alone and still in order to actually have an original thought.
You can’t really have an original thought when reacting to alerts on your phone, scrolling through social media, responding to texts and emails, reading news articles, or otherwise filling your mind with outside stimuli. So long as you are engaged with your phone, all of your thoughts and actions will be reactions, no thought that is either new or truly yours can have a chance to arise.
This is actually true of all media, including the old-fashioned book: even when you are reading an interesting book with a idea that strikes you, in order to really let the idea “sink in,” you will inevitably look up from the book or set it down and turn the idea over in your mind a bit. If all you ever did was devour one book after another — no matter how “intellectual” — without ever pausing to reflect on them, you’d never really develop your own thinking skills.
Now, a well-written book will lend itself to this sort of setting down and reflection, so it’s harder to mindlessly “consume” it versus, say, a breezy magazine article written to be filler for the selling of advertisements. And as we step into more and more “engaging” media — videos, games, scrolling feeds, etc — it becomes easier to consume them mindlessly and harder to step back and reflect.
What is new with the smartphone is that (1) it is filled with apps specially designed to demand your continual attention, and (2) it is always with you. It was barely ten years ago that if you had to stand in line for five minutes, you’d pretty much be left alone with your thoughts. That is no longer the case; as I wrote up top, every time I go back to civilization I am amazed at the speed with which people take their phones out whenever a tiny interval of time opens up without any obvious activity. I suspect that for many people, nowadays, the only time they might be left alone with their thoughts is in the shower.
If this is the relationship you have with your phone, then — assuming you want to live a life that is at least partly directed from within yourself — you have a serious problem. Because you really can’t know what is going on within yourself, nor have a truly independent thought, if you don’t let your mind become still once in awhile.
Some Steps Towards Independence
I’m not going to suggest that you ditch your phone, or that you do anything dramatic like a weekend “digital fast” or the like. Ditching the phone is throwing out the good with the bad, and a “digital fast” — while a good idea — is too big a step for most people.
But how about some of these ideas?
When you are in line at a store, instead of looking to your phone to give you a dopamine rush, maybe stretch your neck and shoulders, or just stare straight ahead and see what thoughts naturally pop up. Or if you are going on a walk or jog, leave the music and podcasts behind and just pay attention to the scenery, or your gait, or focus on a specific problem that has been bugging you?
And, on top of taking advantage of these naturally occurring little breaks in life, maybe consider starting a 5-minute daily meditation practice: it will do wonders for your ability to focus.
Whatever it is, try to find at least five or ten minutes a day where you don’t have external stimuli bombarding you, and find out what is going on in your head instead of on your phone.